Posts Tagged ‘Ryan Hall’

My scheduled run did not occur, once again, last night. Thanksgiving, a day of family and feasts, got in the way; that, and falling asleep on the couch. Yet again, everything is being pushed back. So today, Friday, I ran seven miles. Saturday will be intense, with three sessions of P90X just to get me back on track. I’m scheduled to run eleven miles on Sunday. So much distance, so little time.

My pace today was slow even with the day of rest and turkey. I am disappointed in my results; I should have pushed harder. Recently I heard on a video, “if you can still get back up, you didn’t push hard enough.” So I am clearly not pushing hard enough, because I can still walk.

I need to incorporate speed work into my routine. With some practice, I hope that my pace will increase and that I will get these runs done faster. The biggest downside I have found to this sport is time. If the miles keep increasing, soon I won’t have time to sleep; I only get five hours as it is. Looking over the remaining eight weeks, and if I keep the same pace, I will be running until midnight every other night. Mind you, I like the increased miles and calorie burn, but time is very valuable to me. I guess my sacrifice is sleep.

It is truly amazing what an elite runner like Ryan Hall is capable of accomplishing. The mind boggling fact of the video is that he maintains that pace for the entire marathon. It also makes for an interesting advertisement.

I only have one observation from this run: I have noticed that some people feel the need to turn their high beams on when I am running towards them. I’m not sure why. I see them just fine with their normal headlights. Can you not see the six foot three guy running along the sidewalk towards you? Do you need to flood the street with light in order to see me? Do you need to blind me, so I smack into low hanging, leafless branches? That makes them essentially switches cutting me across the face. Maybe I should thank them for adding some sense of danger to my runs.

There is only one week left until my first race. The goal is to simply learn the etiquette of it. I need to learn how to run in a group before I can hope to run a longer race.